Google Discover eligibility gate: what Google's analyst said

Google’s Discover trust and safety analyst described how content gets into Discover at a live event in Barcelona. The only account we have is the recap author’s notes: John Campbell’s Day 3 recap on ROAST, which covers Eric Murillo’s session at Search Central Live Deep Dive. The slides are not on Google’s events page, so the wording below is the recap’s, not Google’s.

Does Discover have its own bot?#

No, per the recap. Murillo called that the first myth to go: there is no special Discover bot, and everything runs on the normal Google index stack. Google’s Discover help page agrees that content is automatically eligible if it is indexed and meets Discover’s content policies, and that no special tags or structured data are required. Being eligible is not a guarantee of appearing. For the Discover-only ranking change earlier this year, see our February 2026 Discover update page.

How does the eligibility gate work?#

The recap says every piece of content passes an eligibility gate that sends it one of three ways:

• Violation: it is checked for policy compliance and filtered out.
• Low quality: it is judged on E-E-A-T and filtered out.
• Safe and trusted: it becomes Discover eligible.

The recap gives no thresholds, scores or timings for the gate, and neither does Google’s help page. Treat it as a description of order, not a formula.

Which image rules apply?#

According to the recap, even eligible content is decided by image quality. A small thumbnail lowers click-through rate and a large, high-resolution image raises it. The recommendations it lists:

• At least 1,200px wide.
• 300,000 or more total pixels.
• A 16:9 aspect ratio.
• The max-image-preview:large robots setting enabled.
• No generic images such as your site logo, and no text-heavy images.

Murillo also reportedly said images are held to the same policies as the content, so avoid misleading, exaggerated or outrageous ones. We checked the specifications against Google’s Discover help page and they match: at least 1200 px wide, more than 300,000 total pixels, 16x9, and max-image-preview:large (the page also names AMP as another route). It also advises against generic images and text-heavy images in the schema.org markup or og:image tag. Build the directive with the meta robots tag generator.

What about AI slop and spam?#

Per the recap, Murillo was blunt: AI slop is increasing, which means more poor quality content in the feed. He said user feedback matters because it is what new spam filters are built from. If a manual action is taken against your site, it appears in Search Console. Google’s help page says the same for Discover content policy violations. Neither source says how many sites are affected.

What should you check this week?#

The recap lists no new rules, so the useful move is an audit against rules already published. Confirm your key articles are indexed, that each has a large, relevant, non-logo image in og:image, and that your robots directives allow large previews. Then open Search Console and look for a manual action. For the broader topic, see our SERP features hub.